Aaron Kashtan taught three sections of ENGL 1102, the second course in a mandatory first-year writing sequence with a heavy multimodal focus, during his first semester as a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Literature, Media and Communication at Georgia Tech. The specific subject matter for these sections was handwriting and typography. Assignments and readings required students to develop sensitivity to the rhetorical potential of font choice and typographic design and to produce multimodal texts that made significant use of typographic rhetoric. For example, the second essay asked students to compose a handwritten essay that analyzed their own handwriting. In keeping with this special issue's focus on comics, this course design explains how Kashtan's lifelong interest in comics provided the theoretical rationale for this course, even though comics was not its explicit subject. Overall, the assignments discussed in this article suggest ways in which an understanding of comics can inform the way not only multimodal assignments but also traditional alphanumeric writing are taught.